Revision as of 03:52, 22 March 2011

Sundtek is a German manufacturer/software engineering company which provides USB Touchpanel solutions, and analog and digital TV Products.

Sundtek provides their own, closed source, commercially bundled framework and drivers for DVB and V4L.They state that their solution has support for both the S2-API as well as the Legacy DVBv3 API and Video4Linux1/2, and that they have a very high backward compatibility and provide for very easy installation because of independence from kernel drivers. Their installer currently has support for following Architectures

x86-32bit

x86-64bit

PowerPC32

PowerPC64

MIPS

MIPSel

ARM (eabi4)

ARM (oabi)

Supported (tested) Settopboxes with DVB:

Dreambox 800HD

Dreambox 800SE

Dreambox 8000

Dreambox 500HD

Clarke Tech ET9000

VU+ Duo

WDTV Live

Western Digital My Book (Network attached Storage)

Globalscale Sheevaplug

Globalscale Guruplug

All Linux Kernels starting from 2.6.15 are supported, due the independence of the Kernel versions the driver only needs to be installed once, kernelupgrades will not affect or require to reinstall the driver.

Apparently they use a user space application to emulate the API that usually is provided by the v4l and dvb framework by using the kernel's USBFS interface.

They also provide a bundled video player with channel scanning ability which supports H264/AAC as well as multiple character sets.

Sundtek claims to adhere to the LinuxDVB, Video4Linux1/2 API Specifications as far as possible.

They also state out that their driver includes a deinterlacing and easy to use on screen display engine for analog Video (Composite/S-video/Analog TV)

The drivers also support bridging/streaming via W-LAN. It's popular for Sheevaplug Plug Computers and allows to use the device on a remote PC as if it would be connected locally.
Network Howto their USB based DVB-T, DVB-C, DVB-S/S2, ATSC and ISDB-T devices have a so called network mode in order to stream the TV to a remote host. This can be used with Linux based routers, NAS (network storage) and other embedded devices which provide a USB port to act as a network based TV server.

All devices are supported by a single driver, and support deep standby to cool down completely after 15 seconds inactivity